HIS IDEAL INDIVIDUAL YET COLLECTIVE.

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moments of inveterate worldliness, it is when men sink the individual in the social end; if moments of impotent other-worldliness it is when they sink the social end in the individual. Lose the individual, and you have a relentless tyranny, religion reduced to an organized and supercilious ecclesiasticism; lose the social in the individual, and you have a spiritual atomism, religion reduced to a short and easy expedient for winning peace in death and happiness with God, religion made impotent to make men religious and holy and true as citizens on earth or in heaven. The time when the Christian Society has been possessed by the thought of a reigning Christ, of creating a humanity that was a brotherhood obedient to God, articulating and expressing His will in all forms and modes alike of its individual and collective life, has ever been a time of Christian heroes, of men who lived not only to do God's will themselves, but to persuade all men in all states to come and obey it, that they might have an earth which, living to God's glory, created man's highest good.

II.

1. Such then was Christ's ideal. But how was it to be realized? Whose were the creative energies? Where did they live and how were they to be exercised? It is enough meanwhile to note simply this point: Christ Himself was the centre and seat of the creative energies; in Him they existed, as it were personalized, made active, living, powerful, by being compacted, or organized, into a great personality. That the forces that created Christianity proceeded from Christ is open to no manner of question, is sure indubitable fact.

Men may seek to explain what He was, or how He became it, but one thing they cannot deny, that Christ made Christianity; that its being is due to Him. He is as a simple matter of fact the greatest personality in history. The forces that lived in Him are the divinest forces that ever penetrated and possessed the spirit of man. They have effected the grandest and most civilizing revolutions in his history, have exercised over him the mightiest, most commanding influence. Men may seek to resolve the Christ of our Gospels into the child of the myth-making Oriental imagination, made creative by the enthusiasm of a great love, or to explain Him as the last result of the exaggerative spirit and polemical interests of rival parties, tendencies that advance through conflict and antithesis to synthesis and harmony. But then these attempts only prove this: the Person who inspired those imaginations, who called into being these parties, did, in so doing, create Christianity. The fact of His creative action is not changed, nor the wonder lessened, but much rather increased, for just in proportion as the Creator is made less marvellous, the creation becomes the more. To conceive the effect as so extraordinary is only the less to allow any one to argue an ordinary cause. Then, too, the theories are inconsistent with the experience of the men who frame them, for every student of our Gospels confesses the power, commanding, authoritative, of the Christ. In Him there dwells a wondrous fascination. The coldest critic feels warmed into love of Him; in His presence the most daring thinker feels his soul touched with beautiful reverence. The Divinity within Him proves its presence and reality by the admiration it commands, the devotion it creates.

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Spinoza He was the temple of man, where God stood most perfectly revealed, the Divine word or eternal reason become incarnate. Rousseau, in his extravagant way, contrasted Christ and Sokrates, and concluded that while the one died liked a philosopher, the other died like a god. Goethe thought that progress was possible on all sides save one-the moral majesty, the spiritual culture expressed and exhibited in the Gospels could never be excelled. Schiller named the religion of Christ in its purest form the incarnation of the holy, Jesus Himself being to him incarnate holiness. Strauss praised Him as the supreme religious genius of time, who had created and impersonated the ideal or absolute religion. Renan confesses that He merits Divine rank, that to Him belongs the unique honour of having founded the true religion, leaving it to us to be at our best only His disciples and continuators.

And from other sides no less eloquent and conclusive testimonies come. The splendid cycle of thinkers that began with Kant and ended with Hegel, made Christ the last problem of their philosophies; to explain Him was to explain at once religion and man, mind and history. It is a rare yet remarkable fact, that while He is the pre-eminent problem of historical and critical thought, the most hotly debated, the most variously solved, no reasonable man ever doubts His sincerity, or the blameless, solitary, and radiant beauty of His character and life. There is no surer measure of the essential spiritual quality of an age than its estimate of Christ. A time of moral degradation is marked by insensibility to His character, His purposes and aims; a time of moral elevation and heroism is marked by an enthusiasm for Him and His purposes born of the most

eous power.

splendid love. A power so imperishable and immense can never have been at its root an unreal, or unrightEternal law has made it impossible that the false should ever create the true, or a bad ideal form and inspire a good reality. While Christ remains the personality creative of all that is best and noblest in man, let Him live, "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

2. But now, why has Christ been so pre-eminent and creative a personality? Why has He so long remained one? What was the secret, what were the sources of His transcendent might? These are large questions, and it is possible here and now only in the faintest way to indicate some of the lines along which the answers lie. Let this at the outset be noted: what He brought with Him as His absolute gift to faith-an idea or thought of God that made God an absolutely new being to our race. The theological significance of Christ's person is simply infinite. He is in the most absolute sense a revelation of God to men. Man's thought of God, of the cause and end alike of his own being and of the universe, is his most commanding thought; make it, and you make the man. And Christ was here a supreme Creator. He made our thought of God; made His God ours. Since He lived men have felt, and do feel-if God is, then He must be as He is revealed in Jesus Christ. A God like this does explain the world; the world without Him were no home for man.

Now consider what this signifies. Men cannot escape God. Reason, feeling, imagination, conscience, drive us towards the Divine, the Eternal. The attempt to escape Him is an impossible attempt.

HIS ABSOLUTE GIFT TO FAITH.

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Where the choice is conquers the choice. A professed ag

Impulse is stronger than will. not to find Him the impulse Agnosticism is abhorrent to man.

nostic is still a person who knows, and indeed in a

quite infinite degree. His passion is a knowledge so absolute that he knows what things cannot be known. Against his own will the agnostic becomes a seeker after God. It is significant that the most distinguished of our living agnostics, the man whose fundamental principle is that the Infinite, the First and Ultimate Cause, cannot be known, is yet the author of our most comprehensive and omniscient system of philosophy, a system that attempts to explain all things in heaven and earth, alike as to their whence and whither, their genesis, behaviour, and end. If the Ultimate Cause, which simply means the true reason of things, cannot be known, then it is impossible to have any philosophy, for what is philosophy but the search after the true reason of things, conducted in the sure belief that such reason exists and can be found? And so Agnosticism is as fatal to science as to religion, for to attempt to explain the becoming of the world on the basis of absolute nescience as to the primary and efficient cause, is to attempt to make science stand upon a principle that declares knowledge vain, and therefore science impossible.

And as in the case of the individual, who in spite of his agnostic self is driven into gnosticism, so in the history of man. Everywhere he has made most diligent search for God. Everywhere the great goal of thought has been, Who was the First, who is to be the Last? Why came I into being? Why this world? What is the end of our being? The tragedy of the